


Every Day an Anniversary

by gammadolphin



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Anniversary, Established Relationship, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 16:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8675368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gammadolphin/pseuds/gammadolphin
Summary: Jim and Spock think they know the meaning of fear. Until the day they wake up to find Bones in an inexplicable good mood.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a couple months ago for the [McSpirk Holiday Fest](http://mcspirkholidayfest.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr, and figured I'd post it here as well. The prompt it's written for is in the end notes, so as to avoid spoilers.
> 
> Enjoy!

 Jim woke to the smell of pancakes and compost. Since he didn’t remember having gone to sleep next to a diner’s dumpster, this was a perplexing start to the day.

He wrinkled his nose and blinked his eyes open. Spock’s face was inches from his own, his dark eyes open but still slightly bleary from sleep. This was another unusual occurrence. Normally they woke separated by a third body between them. Jim gave Spock a questioning look, and he frowned in a way that meant he had no answer.

The two of them sat up and peered around their quarters with some trepidation. It didn’t take Jim long to spot Bones through the doorway that separated the sleeping area from the rest of the Captain’s quarters. Wearing nothing but a pair of black boxers and a colorfully worded T-shirt that Jim had gotten him for his birthday, Bones was hunched over the replicator, poking at it. He’d also found a griddle somewhere and as Jim and Spock watched in startled silence, he turned back to it and flipped several pancakes.

Now, there were a number of reasons why this was odd. For one, Bones prized sleeping in above just about all of life’s other pleasures. Unless there was a medical emergency, he was almost always the last to rise. It was one of the reasons he usually slept in the middle. (The other reason being that neither Spock nor Jim had been able to stand letting go of him for a while after a certain incident on Minara II, but they don’t really talk about that) In fact, sometimes Spock had to physically lift him out of bed and stand him on his feet before he would really be awake. For him to rise voluntarily before either of his boyfriends was unheard of.

For another, Bones Did Not cook. He liked to bake sometimes, when it was someone’s birthday or he was feeling homesick, but he didn’t cook. Not even with the replicator.

But the most bizarre, most _alarming_ thing was that Bones was whistling. _Whistling_ . If Bones didn’t cook, then he _definitely_ didn’t whistle. He hummed absently when he was in a good mood, and Jim had caught him singing in the shower once or twice. But the only time Jim had ever seen Bones whistle was when they'd had to get the entire crew high in an incident that Jim still couldn’t quite believe actually happened. He didn’t think this was a similar circumstance.

Baffled and nervous, Jim turned back to Spock. Before either of them could figure out what to say, Bones spotted them.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” he said. He grabbed a tray and approached them. “Here, Jim, I made pancakes for you. It’s from that recipe you loved on Ceyliss III. The replicator fought me on some of the ingredients, but I showed it who was boss.”

He passed a plate to Jim with a quick kiss on the cheek.

“And this is for you, Spock. It’s that weird Vulcan breakfast goop that you were telling me about the other week, I still can’t pronounce the name.”

“Dzhih-shuhk?”

“That’s the one. Anyway, I have no idea if the replicator was fighting me on it. If it’s not supposed to taste like dirt, well, you don’t have to eat it.”

He gave Spock the food and a kiss as well.

Jim had progressed from mystified and vaguely alarmed to full-on terrified. Bones did not have moods like this without a reason. And Jim had a terrible suspicion that he was supposed to know what that reason was. He looked at Spock.

“First date?” he whispered.

Spock didn’t have to ask what he meant. Jim could see the wheels turning in his formidable brain as he too tried to figure out what anniversary they’d forgotten.

“Two months ago.”

“First kiss?” Jim didn’t have to wait for Spock to answer that one. “Right, two months ago. Uh...first ‘I love you’?”

“I still haven’t gotten my first ‘I love you’ from Spock!” Bones called from the other room.

Jim was too surprised to feel guilty that Bones had overheard them.

“You what?” he shouted back. Spock had told Jim he loved him just weeks after the three of them had started dating.

“Yeah, it’s kind of this ‘show, don’t tell’ thing we’ve got going on,” Bones said at a more normal volume as he poked his head back into the sleeping area. He winked at Spock, who was prodding dubiously at his ‘Vulcan breakfast goop.’ “First time I knew he loved me was when he volunteered to do all the paperwork after that incident with those handsy alien diplomats. You know, with the funky eyelids.”

Jim remembered that incident better than he would have liked. The amount of paperwork it’d generated had been the stuff of horror stories. He looked again at Spock, who had turned his attention from his breakfast to Bones. He was giving their lover one of those soft looks of his, the kind that the rest of the world so rarely got to see. And Bones was returning it, his eyes warm and his lips curved into a small, tender smile.

And Jim realized that they didn’t need the words.

“When’s the first time you knew he loved you?” he asked Spock as Bones retreated into the other room again.

Spock didn’t have to pause to consider.

“The day he defended me to his former mentor, Dr. Amante, when he thought that I could not hear. Leonard’s vehemence was quite...revealing.”

Bones had told Jim more than once about Amante. He’d used to admire the man, respect him above most of the others that he knew. He’d been thrilled when the _Enterprise_ had been tasked with bringing Amante to an important medical conference in a distant system. But Bones hadn’t said a single word about him after they’d dropped him off. Now Jim knew why. Only Bones was allowed to insult Spock.

Jim smiled, overcome by a swell of affection for the two most important people in his life. But then he remembered their predicament. He pitched his voice low again.

“I don’t suppose _that_ happened a year ago?”

“Jim, on this day one year ago, Leonard and I were in the captivity of the slave dealers on Minareth and you were temporarily incorporeal. I do not believe that there was anything worth commemorating.”

Jim grimaced at the recollection. It was one of the more terrifying ones in his memory banks.

“Okay, what about two years ago?”

“You and Leonard were stranded by an ion storm on a planet whose surface temperature never rose above 3.2 degrees. Given Leonard’s extreme distaste for the cold, and the hypothermia that you both developed, I find it unlikely that he harbors any fond recollections from that day either.”

“Geez, what happened the year before that? Were all three of us dying of the plague or something then?”

Spock tilted his head, considering.

“That, I believe, was a relatively standard day aboard the former _Enterprise_. We were charting Sector 88573. There were no unusual incidents.”

“Well there has to be _something_!” Jim hissed, exasperated. He shot a nervous look through the doorway. “He’s _whistling_!”

“Yes. A twenty-second century popular Earth piece, if I am not mistaken.”

“It’s twenty-first century, and that’s not the point!” Which was true, although Jim was going to give some serious thought later as to why Bones would have _Call Me Maybe_ stuck in his head. That thought would have to be followed by some introspection about why Jim recognized the tune. “We are _clearly_ missing something important, and if we don’t figure out what before his good mood snaps-”

Jim had plenty of ideas about where that sentence was headed, but he was interrupted by an emergency page.

The emergency turned out to be a ship in distress. The small freighter had experienced a warp drive malfunction and was counting down to a total meltdown. So they beamed the freighter’s crew to the _Enterprise_ and retreated to a safe distance. Standard stuff, nothing the _Enterprise_ hadn’t dealt with more than once.

It was a new one on Jim though when the aliens that beamed aboard turned out to be drunk off their asses.

Apparently the freighter had picked up a shipment of what they’d thought was Romulan ale, and decided to indulge themselves. Something about it being someone named Sput’s birthday. But it hadn’t been Romulan ale. It had been something with an alcohol content that probably would’ve blinded a human with a single sip. The result was...messy.

Jim had no choice but to send them all to sickbay. Really.

“You really think it wise to compound the trouble that we will already be in for forgetting our anniversary?” Spock asked him.

“Hey, if even you still can’t remember what anniversary it is, then it can’t possibly be a big one. Bones can’t blame us for not knowing what it is.”

Spock raised an eyebrow at him.

“You truly believe that?”

Jim gulped.

He then proceeded to find any and every excuse he could to avoid going to sickbay himself. But considering the fact that he'd just allowed a ship full of aliens to board his vessel and every last one of them was there, that didn't last long. Especially once Spock decided to just face the music and go, making Jim look like he was hiding. Which he was, but still.

So it was with the utmost trepidation that he crept into medbay an hour after he'd dumped an unreasonable number of intoxicated aliens on his notoriously grumpy boyfriend. But Bones seemed to have a special sense for people entering his domain, and that sense was heightened a thousandfold when it came to Jim, so his attempts at stealth were decidedly ineffective.

But Jim was too stunned to even put together an escape strategy as Bones started heading for him.

“You’re...still smiling,” he said dumbly when Bones had reached his side. Bones tilted his head, considering.

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Your sickbay is full of two dozen smashed aliens, at least two of whom are puking something orange onto your floor, and you, Leonard H. McCoy, are still smiling.”

Bones raised an eyebrow and tossed a glance over his shoulder. But when he turned back, that damn smile was still in place. He shrugged.

Jim stared at him for another moment, and then scanned medbay for backup.

“Spock!” he yelled when he spotted the familiar figure. Spock looked up at once, quirking an eyebrow at him. “Something’s wrong with Bones!”

“Oh for the love of God, Jim,” Bones sighed, finally looking a bit more like himself.

But Spock had already joined them, studying Bones with concerned intensity.

“Are you ill, Leonard?” he asked. Bones rolled his eyes.

“I am in a _good mood_ ,” he said. “It happens. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get over it. Now quit hovering, both of you. I can handle things here, and I even managed to get the leader of these clowns sober enough for you to deal with. So take him, get out of my sickbay, and go do your jobs. I’ll see you tonight.”

Jim was in no way reassured, but having been so summarily dismissed, he and Spock had little choice but to take the proffered alien and retreat with him to one of the conference rooms.

Once they’d dealt with the logistics of the freighter crew and packed its captain off to his guest quarters to sleep off the rest of his poor judgment, the rest of the shift was fairly ordinary. And if any of the crew were wondering why Jim shot off the occasional question of ‘first dance?’ or ‘first _Star Wars_ marathon?’ or ‘first time you admitted he was right about something?’ and got varying time frames from his first officer, none of them bothered to comment.

*****

It turned out that when Bones had said he’d see the other two that night, he didn’t just mean in their quarters. Rather, he was waiting for them in the turbolift when they got off shift. And Jim would deny to his dying day that he’d squeaked and jumped behind Spock when those turbolift doors first opened.

“You do realize you’re not in trouble, right?” Bones asked him, lips twitching and eyebrow raised.

“See, you say that, and yet...” Jim did _not_ shift further behind Spock. He didn’t.

Bones rolled his eyes.

“Observation deck,” he said, and the lift started moving.

“Leonard, while I cannot deny the appeal of tormenting Jim in this manner-”

“Hey!”

“-you are frequently reminding us of the detrimental effects of stress on the human body. Perhaps it would be best if you were to, as you might say it, ‘put him out of his misery.’”

“Oh good, Spock. Encourage him to snuff me, that’s great. Thanks.”

“You’re both ridiculous,” Bones said fondly as the turbolift doors opened.

He looped an arm around Spock’s waist, and the other around Jim’s, and tugged them forward onto the observation deck. He tried to, at least. Once Jim caught sight of what was waiting for them, he stopped dead.

The lights had been turned off, and the only illumination came from the swirling nebulae and glittering stars outside the window, and the candles that stood on a small table before the spectacular view. The flames lit up what could only be described as a romantic dinner for three.

“It’s not actual flame,” Bones said, as if that concern had been anywhere among the thoughts flickering through Jim’s mind. “You know, since starships and fire don’t mix all that well. But there’s just something about the atmosphere they create, you know?”

Bones’ voice had gotten a little less amused and a little more nervous, and Jim finally tore his gaze away from the table to focus on him.

It was a badly kept secret that Leonard McCoy was actually the biggest softie on the ship. But what fewer people knew was that deep down, underneath his grumpiness and scars and cynicism, he had a streak of innocent romanticism. But that streak had been buried deep after the disastrous end of his marriage, and it took a lot to bring it to the surface so blatantly like this.

“What is this, Bones?” Jim asked, all teasing gone. “Really?”

“Sit down,” Bones invited. Once they had, he settled his hands on Jim and Spock’s. He pulled in a slow breath and looked out through the clearsteel window, and Jim was momentarily distracted by the sight of the universe reflected in his eyes.

“Today,” Bones said finally, and he was blushing a little but his voice was sure, “marks the anniversary of the first time I looked out that window - well, not _that_ window, but the one on the old ship - and wasn’t afraid of what I saw out there.”

It was so unexpected that Jim didn’t have the first idea what to say. He looked at Spock, who was studying Bones like he was a precious puzzle, the only one in the universe really worth solving.

“But you weren’t even on the ship this day last year, or the year before that,” Jim said.

Bones smiled softly.

“No, I wasn’t,” he agreed. “Which is why this is the first time we’re celebrating.”

He looked at Spock.

“I know you remember. Why don’t you set the scene for us forgetful humans?”

Spock tilted his head.

“When our shift ended that day, Jim and I retired to the observation deck for a game of chess. You joined us, and remained for over two hours. As I recall, you said nothing for the entire duration.”

“Hmm.” Bones looked out at the stars again. “When I walked in and saw the two of you...it wasn’t like it was anything I hadn’t seen before, but something about that night...you were winning that time, Jim, and Spock you were pretending to be all logical and emotionless about it but I could see you were trying to think of ways to flip the board without making it look deliberate. And I knew the two of you were just going to keep at it until you’d both won half a dozen times each, and mercilessly raz each other so politely that anyone else watching wouldn’t have any idea what was happening, and somehow end the evening even closer than you’d started it. But when you saw me you both just lit up somehow, and I realized then that I was a part of this incredible thing you had going, and that...”

Bones smiled a little.

“That was when it hit me that there was nowhere else in the universe I’d rather have been. Right there, on the observation deck of a starship, staring the cold abyss in the face, and I was exactly where I wanted to be.”

Bones’ fingers curled over Jim and Spock’s hands, hanging onto them tight.

“Three years and the start of a relationship later, and that hasn’t changed,” he said. ”Hell, it’s truer than ever. The two of you gave me a gift that day, an incredible one. Seemed like a good day to give you both a little something back.”

Tender warmth was spreading through Jim, too big and deep to put to words. He twisted his hand to lace his fingers through Bones’. He stretched the other across the table to Spock, who took it readily. The three of them just sat there for a moment, the galaxy spread out before them but their eyes only for each other.

“Your affections are already more than gift enough, Leonard,” Spock said.

He spoke in that measured, level tone of his, but the truth of it was in his eyes. Nothing more needed to be said. Not about this, anyway.

“You need not have butchered a beloved Vulcan recipe to convey your appreciation.”

Jim smiled as the inevitable and affectionate bickering broke out. He knew exactly what Bones had felt that day three years ago. He was right where he wanted to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt by [elletromil](http://elletromil.tumblr.com/): Can be either AOS or TOS, but how about our boys celebrating an anniversary of their own?  
> What do they get up to, do they go somewhere special? Do they stay on the enterprise? Do they have to put their plan on hold because they have to deal with some kind of ship-wide emergency?  
> And if you want to have even more fun, what about only one of them considering the date as an anniversary of some sort and having fun spoiling the other two while they have absolutely no idea why it is happening. It could be the anniversary of something simple like the first time the three of them shared a meal together. It could be something that is of high importance to Vulcans, but seem so normal to humans. It could also be the day one of them finally realised that yes, this was it, this really couldn't get more perfect even with all the conflict and difficulties they would certainly have, they would fight to get through it.
> 
> Thanks for reading! If you're interested, I can be found on [tumblr](http://drmcbones.tumblr.com/).


End file.
